This I Know is True

I like to pretend I’m asleep when the nurses come at 2am daydreams slipping into the dark

I hold my bruised belly swollen beyond 24 weeks    a nimbus cloud of Heparin

puncture wounds         it will be many months after their birth before I see

skin again          nurses take blood from my neck                   this depleted body sinking in on itself

I think about all the mothers who have lay on this bed before

………………………………..I’ve read hospital psychosis is real

………………………………………………………………………what are we to do but pretend we never wanted

pictures with sheer lace draping our perfectly round bellies  how we pretend we never

imagined the suckling of our newborn                       how the doctor would whisk baby from umbilical

cord to breast              how we pretend sounds of machines don’t creep into our dreams

begging us awake                   how they still years later don’t trigger a slow chill

creeping into our bones on early January mornings   when daydreams don’t fill the night

I read   let me escape this hard bed these strangling cords wrapping themselves            holding me

fast to this place while my baby searches for a door into this world but nothing can distract

any mother begging to be    .   whole              begging for healthy and perfect

 …………..Mother may we          be able to look at our bodies the way we did

………………………before the broken

……………………………………………slipped in

……………………………………………………….quietly whispered                          No

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Serena Rodriguez’s work has been published in Poetry, Inverted Syntax, Santa Fe Literary Review, and MindWell Poetry; she was the winner of the Santa Fe Accolades Poetry Contest 2017 and The Roadrunner Review Poetry Prize 2022 and was a 2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize finalist for The Georgia Review. She graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with her MFA in Creative Writing in May 2022. Serena works as a Creative Writing Visiting Professor at IAIA. Born in Mississippi, she lives in New Mexico with her partner and kiddo, where they hike the Bosque and eat all the tacos.